Top Lane

League of Legends ~ Top Lane

I play League of Legends, along with 67 million people.¹ I’m on NA and I play every champion reasonably well and can fill any role.² I am most comfortable on AD champs in the top lane—Tryndamere/Fiora are my mains—since last hitting is harder on others :P.

I play casually, if you could call solo(yolo?) queuing to gold on three accounts casual. My main lesson to anyone trying to climb is to let your team carry you. Sometimes you aren’t going to have any impact and will probably feed. Instead, try going even in lane and winning the game later, that’s hella freelo.

If I haven’t scared you off yet, the rest of my top lane guide/League reflection follows.³

Island

I started out League on ADC, tried Mid, then Jungle, and finally Support. I was terrified of top, until after playing tons of bot lane dominion I realized that I was a indeed a top laner: a lone wolf who wins lane to provide massive impact for their team.

Top lane is an island. The lane where two people solo dolo it out while the rest of the teams do work. That used to be the case up until recently. If I recall correctly, Wingsofdeathx described the new top lane teleport (TP) meta as an island, but now with nuclear launch codes to call down a ballistic strike.⁴

Trading

Trading is the central concept of top, which is sometimes hard to grasp for players more familiar to other roles. Trading is when you and your enemy both engage in fisticuffs, which then either immediately results in both parties whimpering away to wait for cooldowns, or someone going all-in for the kill.

The second tenet of top would have to be chugging health pots, since you want to always be keeping your health topped up, since this will usually save your life/lane. You might not win all trades, but if you have health pots that doesn’t matter (although you do delay your core build if you rely too heavily on them). Sometimes you can also start the game with a flask, but beware the lack of raw stats, and instead trade favourably.

Sometimes, you might need to give up cs to not lose more cs. This might sound counterintuitive but if you lose a ton of health getting a single creep, you’ll likely be zoned for a much longer time after that from any other creeps.

You’ll also want to avoid using mana to cs, but sometimes that’s a necessity. This segues into the concept of trading with an enemy’s mana bar, unless of course they are manaless or use a different resource. You can try to make the enemy go out of mana (OOM) which most people overlook when trying to flatline the enemy’s health. Once oom, many champs become cannon minions.

Chicanery

Sometimes, for a slight xp/gold advantage, you’ll want to clear a jungle camp before TPing/walking top at the beginning of the game.⁵ You might want to double jungle for the same bonus but keep your jungler healthy, but not if you’re a burden lacking damage.

Intricacies

During early level all-ins, your auto attacks will usually account for a large percentage of damage, along with minion damage. Note that certain champions (e.g. Jayce, Elise, Nidalee) have more spells to crush you with early so careful. Some champions (i.e. Tryndamere, Yasuo) are also very crit reliant, so be cautious of getting randomly rekt. Also be very aware of power spikes at level 1, 2, 6, 9, and 16:

• Lvl 1: Be careful since this is the point of the game where you will have the least amount of health. If you start a fight the creeps will likely rip you a new one.
• Lvl 2: This is when you, or your enemy, gets to lvl a second spell, and gain more raw stats. You can win a lane playing off your level 2 correctly.
• Lvl 6: Ultimates can now be skilled, so be very cautious of getting bopped.
• Lvl 9: This is when most champs will have maxed their primary damage spell (i.e. Vladimir’s Q - Transfusion). This is a surprising point where some matchup dominance becomes reversed.
• Lvl 16: You can finally skill the third point into your ultimate, it’s game breaking on certain champs (i.e. Kennen) so it’s also worth delaying a teamfight for.

You can also position yourself favourably to win trades and, after winning enough trades/capitalizing on mistakes, you can easily all-in your enemy and gain an advantage that way. A kill, or even forcing a back, puts them behind in terms of xp/gold, and you can sometimes push in the minion wave and double the aforementioned benefit.

But if you ended up dying, the opposite will happen and you’ll have to adjust your playstyle accordingly. Usually dying once isn’t a death sentence for top, and you’ll likely have another shot of taking control, but after that first one you’re already on the wrong foot. Think of it as a snowball (pun intended) perched on top of a mountain. Once it’s been nudged to a side…there will be blood.

Roaming

Whether you’re winning or losing top, you can gank mid, bot, or even the enemy jungler. It’s roaming to win, and it puts you and your team ahead.

Ganks

Sometimes a champion on your team will surface from the jungle and initiate a gank. Ganks are great since you can usually kill/force your enemy out of lane, but sometimes the enemy will have the same idea and a small 2v2 skirmish erupts. You’ll have to always be very conscious of this when you enemy suddenly starts making mistakes to bait you in. Another thing to note is don’t expect a gank if you’re falling behind, lest you end up losing the 2v2 counter-gank or getting 1v2’ed (i.e. Riven/Darius).

Some people also tend to play very aggressively to win trades just by having a larger minion wave on their side. This usually works but leaves them extremely overextended, and ripe for an enemy to swing by for a freebie. You could remedy this by warding, and then soak jungle ganks to benefit your team.⁶ You must remember it is almost always your responsibility to win your own lane, ganks are icing on the cake.

Dives

Coordinate well with your teammate, and usually let the one with a tower aggro reset to tank the shots first. Otherwise you need to be incredibly confident you’ll get the kill and escape, or trade kills and hopefully leave your wave pushing into their tower.

A neat trick is to hold the ~(tilde) key to let you click through towers when the enemy tries to cower behind it.

Freezing

If you’re winning lane, instead of farming the enemy champ for reduced gold value (and tons of effort) you can try to snowball lazily by freezing the wave and denying your opponent, forcing them to roam or lose out on exp/gold. If they do roam, you can push the wave into their tower and force them to make a desperate play to cut their losses. It’s usually a win/win, but lane dominance must be established to do so.

Winning

You can group for objectives, sometimes even sacrificing your outer top tower, since they provide great global benefits to your team.⁷ You’ll also want to perfect backing times, TP ganks, or the fabled homeguard TP pain train.⁸

To close you can either group or split-push. If you’re feeling like a god—or have reliable escapes—you can solo push down a lane until you open the gates. Hopefully you have TP so you can help when the enemy inevitably forces an uneven fight across the map. Otherwise group and peel or dive essential targets during team fights.

But above all else, being friendly, helpful, chivalrous is why I love playing top lane. Sometimes you’ll be counterpicked and other times you’re feeding like a boss. Learn from mistakes. Farm under tower. Get carried. There are tons of solutions that aren’t obvious during duress.

Much of what I said applies in some form to all the other lanes in League, and I probably skimmed over a few concepts, but I tried to cover what I felt were the essentials to winning League of Legends games from top lane.